- Flights to St. Petersburg suspended, now resumed
- Unidentified Object Reports
- The Department of Defense says it has been conducting drills
MOSCOW, Feb 28 (Portal) – Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was conducting air defense drills with interceptors after St Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport was forced to suspend all flights for an hour on Tuesday.
The government of Russia’s second largest city announced the closure on its official Telegram channel without giving a reason for the suspension, as unconfirmed media reports said an unidentified object such as a drone had been sighted in the area.
City officials later said Tuesday that flights had resumed and that a temporary airspace ban within a 200-kilometer (124-mile) radius of Pulkovo was lifted at 12:00 p.m. local time (09:00 GMT).
In a statement issued about an hour after flights resumed, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had been conducting drills in Russia’s western airspace, using warplanes.
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“During the training, the air defense forces worked on detection, interception and identification of targets, as well as interaction with emergency services and law enforcement agencies,” Russian news agencies quoted the ministry as saying.
Combat plans were said to have been flown as part of the training exercise. The exercises were not announced beforehand and resulted in several flights being diverted and airlines having to postpone flight schedules for the remainder of the day.
Data from website FlightRadar24 showed several flights to St Petersburg returned to their destinations early Tuesday, while the airspace closure also affected flights en route to Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, which requires planes to fly via St Petersburg.
By 12:00 p.m. local time, flights were again flying towards St. Petersburg, and the planes had landed and taken off again from the airport.
In a briefing after flights resumed, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the causes of the hour-long disruption, but said President Vladimir Putin was fully briefed on the situation.
Portal reporting; writing by Jake Cordell; Editing by Andrew Osborn
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